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facilitated
communication (FC) ("supported typing")

FC is amazing because it has surpassed all
other junk science fads, affecting families, schools, universities, the law, and even the
arts. --Brian J. Gorman

Facilitated Communication (FC) is a technique that allegedly allows communication by
those who were previously unable to communicate by speech or signs due to autism, mental
retardation, brain damage, or such diseases as cerebral palsy. The technique involves a
facilitator who places her hand over that of the patient's hand, arm or wrist,
and guides a finger to letters, words, or pictures on a board or keyboard. The patient is allegedly
able to communicate through his or her hand to the hand of the facilitator which then is
guided to a letter, word, or picture, spelling out words
or expressing complete thoughts. Through their facilitators, previously mute
patients recite poems, carry on high level intellectual conversations, or
simply communicate. Parents are grateful to discover that their child is not
hopelessly retarded but is either normal or above normal in intelligence. FC
allows their children to demonstrate their intelligence; it provides them
with a vehicle heretofore denied them. But is it really their child who is
communicating? Controlled tests demonstrate conclusively that the only one doing the
communicating is the facilitator.

The
American Psychological Association has issued a
position paper on FC, stating that
"Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that facilitated communication is not a
scientifically valid technique for individuals with autism or mental retardation" and
describing FC as "a controversial and unproved communicative procedure with no
scientifically demonstrated support for its efficacy."

Facilitated Communication therapy began in Australia with Rosemary Crossley. The center
for FC in the United States is Syracuse University, which houses the Facilitated Communication Institute (FCI), now called the Institute on Communication and Inclusion, in their School of Education. The FC Institute was established in 1992. It conducts
research, provides training to teach people to become facilitators, hosts seminars and
conferences, publishes a quarterly newsletter and produces and sells materials promoting
FC, including a six-part video series for $50 per video ($250 for the series).
In what might be called a nod to Orwell and Newspeak, FCI is now called the Institute for Communication and Inclusion and FC is now called "supported typing."*

While several studies have indicated that facilitated communication does tap into the
mind of a person who heretofore had been incommunicado, most studies have shown that
facilitated communication only taps into the beliefs and expectations of the facilitator.
Many control studies have failed to produce strong evidence that facilitated communication
works. Defenders of FC routinely criticize as insignificant or malicious those studies
that fail to validate FC. Yet, it is unlikely that there is a massive conspiracy on the
part of all those who have done research on this topic and have failed to arrive at
findings agreeable to the FCI.

There have been numerous critics of FC, including
Gina Green, Ph.D., Director of
Research at the New England Center for Autism, Southboro, Massachusetts, and Associate
Scientist at the E.K. Shriver Center, Waltham, Massachusetts, and Howard C. Shane, Ph.D.,
Director of the Communication Enhancement Center, Department of Otolaryngology and
Communication Disorders at Children's Hospital, Boston, and Associate Professor of
Otolaryngology in the Harvard Medical School. A very damaging, detailed criticism was
presented on PBS's "Frontline", October 19, 1993. The program was repeated
December 17, 1996, and added that since the first showing, Syracuse University has claimed
to have done three studies which verify the reality and effectiveness of FC, while thirty
other studies done elsewhere have concluded just the opposite.

The Frontline program showed facilitators allegedly describing what their
clients were viewing, when it was clear their clients' heads were tilted so far back they
couldn't have been viewing anything but the ceiling. When facilitators could not see an
object which their client could see (a solid screen blocked each from seeing what the
other was seeing) they routinely typed out the wrong answer. Furthermore, FC clients
routinely use a flat board or keyboard, over which the facilitator holds their pointing
finger. Even the most expert typist could not routinely hit correct letters without some
reference as a starting point. (Try looking away from your keyboard and typing a sentence
using just one finger held in the air above the keyboard.) Facilitators routinely look at
the keyboard; clients do not. The messages' basic coherence indicates that they most
probably are produced by someone who is looking at the keyboard.

Nevertheless, there are many testimonials supporting FC,
namely, letters from clients who are grateful to FC for allowing them to show to the world
that they are not retarded or stupid. Some of them may be from people who have been
genuinely helped by FC. It seems that the FCI treats the retarded, autistic and those with
cerebral palsy. I have had several students with cerebral palsy. As students, they have
been no better and no worse than most of my other students. They have used assistants who
helped translate their communication for me. Usually, the student had a card (with letters
or words or pictures) on his or her lap. The student would point to letters or words and
sometimes speak; the assistant would translate for me. Anyone familiar with Helen Keller,
Stephen Hawking or Christy Brown knows that blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, multiple
sclerosis, amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis (ALS), or physical or neurological disorders, do not necessarily
affect the intellect. There is no necessary connection between a physical handicap and a
mental handicap. We also know that such people often require an assistant to facilitate
their communication. But what facilitators do to help the likes of a Hawking or a Brown is
a far cry from what those in the facilitated communication business are doing.

It may well be that some of those helped by FC suffer from cerebral palsy and are
mentally normal or gifted. Their facilitators help them communicate their thoughts. But
the vast majority of FC clients apparently are mentally retarded or autistic. Their facilitators appear to be reporting their own thoughts, not their
patient's thoughts. Interestingly, the facilitators are genuinely shocked when they
discover that they are not really communicating their patient's thoughts. Their reaction
is similar to that of dowsers and others with "special
powers" who, when tested under controlled conditions, find they don't have any
special powers at all.

If FC worked one would think that it would be easy to test by letting several different
facilitators be tested with the same client under a variety of controlled conditions. If
different "personalities" emerged, depending on the facilitator, that would
indicate that the facilitator is controlling the communication. But, believers in FC claim
that it only works when a special bond has been established between facilitator and
patient. It is interesting that the parents and other loved ones who have been bonding
with the patient for years are unable to be facilitators with their own children. FC needs
a kind stranger to work. And when the kind strangers and their patients are put to the
test, they generally fail. We are told that is because the conditions made them nervous.
These ad hoc excuses sound familiar; they sound like the
complaints of parapsychologists.

Despite much criticism and many experiments demonstrating that the messages, poems,
brilliant discourses, etc., being transmitted by the facilitators originate in the
facilitators themselves, the FC Institute is going strong. With support groups all over
the world and a respectable place at a respectable university, there is little chance that
FC will soon fade away. Those within the FC movement are convinced FC "works."
Skeptics think the evidence is in and FC is a delusion for the most part. It is also a dangerous
delusion. Critics have noted a similarity between FC therapy and
repressed memory therapy: patients are accusing their parents and others of having
sexually abused them. Facilitators are taught that something like 13% of their clients
have been sexually abused. This information may unconsciously influence their work. The
facilitator cannot imagine that he/she is the source of the horrible charges being
expressed. Neither can school administrators or law enforcement authorities who believe FC
is a magical way to tap into the thoughts of the autistic or the severely retarded. With
repressed memory therapy the evidence emerges when a "repressed
memory" is brought to light or when a child is interrogated by therapists trained
to treat sexually abused children. There is overwhelming evidence that many repressed
memories of sexual abuse, as well as many "memories" of interrogated children
originate in the minds and words of therapists who suggest and otherwise plant them in
their patients' minds. Similar findings have been made with FC: facilitators report sexual
abuse and their messages have been used to falsely charge parents and others with sexual
abuse of mentally and physically handicapped persons.

The criticisms of FC as another therapy leading to a witch-hunt, turning decent parents
into accused molesters of their handicapped children are not without justification. How is
one to defend oneself against an allegation made by someone who can never be interrogated
directly? Missy Morton, an expert from the FC Institute suggests the following:

One facilitator can in any given case be mistaken, or can be
influencing the person, and as a precaution it is helpful to have the message repeated to
a second facilitator. If this is not immediately feasible a decision has to be taken as to
whether the situation will allow any decision to wait until a second facilitator can be
introduced. If with a second facilitator the message is confirmed in detail then it may be
taken as confirmed that an allegation has been made. ("Disclosures of Abuse
through Facilitated Communication: Getting and Giving Support," Missy Morton,
Facilitated Communication Institute Syracuse University Division of Special Education and
Rehabilitation, May 1992.)

If there were evidence that facilitators were usually reporting the thoughts of their
clients, there would still be concern for ensuring that the rights of the accused were not
abused. But as the evidence is overwhelming that in most cases of FC, the facilitator is
reporting his or her own thoughts, the effort to ensure against false accusations should
be enormous. Yet, those in the forefront of the movement indicate how trivial they take
the problem to be when they focus on problems of ambiguity. Here is Ms. Morton's warning
issued to facilitators:

Facilitated communication is never as fast or as fluent as normal
speech. Messages tend to be short, even telegraphic, and may omit grammatical bridges. It
is not always clear what message the person is trying to get across with the words he or
she has spelt out.

The message may be incomplete;

One person spelt out MY FATHER IS F...ING ME - clear enough, you would
think, if the facilitator hadn't carried on to get MY FATHER IS F...ING ME AROUND.

The letters or words chosen may not be those that the student really
intended.

This way of dealing with ambiguous communication seems hopelessly inadequate. What is
needed is some way to prevent facilitators from unjustly accusing parents of heinous acts
against their children. It is likely that if most of the facilitators kept reporting
sexual abuses, this movement would have gotten nowhere. The grieving, hopeful parents
would never put up with such abuse.

Boynton, Janice. 2012. Facilitated Communication—what harm it can do: Confessions of a former facilitator. Abstract "This article is a response to the most recent media coverage of sexual abuse allegations against parents obtained through Facilitated Communication (FC). Some parents, caregivers, educators, and researchers continue to use FC, despite overwhelming evidence within the scientific community that messages obtained through FC are facilitator-authored. In 1992, I was the facilitator in the Wheaton case and, through the guise of FC, brought sexual abuse allegations against the family of the autistic child, Betsy, with whom I worked. Authorship of the messages were challenged through scientific testing. The results of the testing concluded beyond doubt that I, not the child, authored the messages. Despite my reticence to give up my belief in FC, I could no longer ignore the scientific studies that replicated my own personal experiences with the purported technique. What follows is an overview of how I became involved with FC, how the sexual abuse allegations surfaced, and what happened when my belief in FC was challenged through scientific testing."

It is a rare thing of beauty to see someone change her mind on the basis of the scientific evidence when that evidence contradicts what she knows in her heart to be true from personal experience.

new The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield Philosophy professor found guilty of sexual assault on a disabled man she claimed gave his consent through facilitated communication with her as his guide. [/new]

Rutgers-Newark philosophy chairwoman fights criminal sexual assault charges Anna Stubblefield is the chairwoman of Rutgers-Newark’s philosophy department and an outspoken proponent of facilitated communication. D.J. is a 33-year-old man with cerebral palsy for whom Stubblefield has been facilitating since 2008. By 2010, Stubblefield was taking D.J. to conferences in Philadelphia and Wisconsin, where, according to his family, D.J. would communicate to the audience with Stubblefield acting as his facilitator. Today, Stubblefield, 44, is facing criminal charges of aggravated sexual assault for allegedly molesting D.J. repeatedly in her Newark offices in 2011. She’s been placed on administrative leave without pay, university officials say. Doctors claimed that D.J. has the mental capacity of an 18-month old.

Web chat replay: What is facilitated communication? Detroit Free Press staff writer L.L. Braiser hosted a Web chat with professor James Todd of Eastern Michigan University, who has studied facilitated communication extensively. It was through facilitated communication, in which the subject’s hand is guided on a keyboard, that Julian and Thal Wendrow’s 14-year-old autistic and mute daughter alleged that her father had been sexually abusing her. [See the next news item for rmore on the Wendrow's trial by pseudoscience.]

Handler beliefs affect scent detection dog outcomes I couldn't decide whether to link this story under Clever Hans or facilitated communication, so I'm placing it in both entries. It seems that sniffer dogs aren't doing the finding, their handlers are. At least that's what a study of 18 dogs and their human handlers found. The study is small and didn't use drugs or explosives. Next step?

Dad's arrest in sex case results in $1.8M settlement Three years ago police in West Bloomfield, Michigan, arrested a man and accused him of raping his autistic daughter. The charges were based on the testimony of a woman practicing facilitated communication. The child can't speak but the faciliator, a school aide, reported that the 14-year-old autistic girl, who can't speak and functions at the level of a 2-year-old, was telling her that her father began raping her when she was 7 and her mother stood by. There was no physical evidence the girl had been assaulted. Recently the township's insurance carrier agreed to pay Julian and Thal Wendrow $1.8 million to settle a wrongful-arrest suit.

Just
when you thought medical reporting in the mass media
couldn't get any worse, you're proved
wrong again. The media are hot on the story of Rom Houben,
who allegedly began communicating in sophisticated prose after 23 years in a vegetative state.
Most of the stories I've seen on the topic claim Houben is
using a computer to communicate. The Sacramento Bee has
an AP story from Raf Casert that claimsHouben "communicates with one finger and a special touch screen on his
wheelchair." Casert describes an interview where Houben is
depicted as "punching the message into the screen." The article
does not mention that Houben's arm and finger are
(literally) being manipulated by a facilitator when he
supposedly communicates. (An online
article by Casert does name the facilitator—she's called a
"speech therapist," however—and describes how she "assists"
Houben. I call her activity the clever Linda
phenomenon.)

Here is what his facilitator typed and is being passed on to the
unsuspecting world as coming from a brain that has been silent
for over two decades:

I am called Rom. I am not dead. The nurses came, they
patted me, they sometimes took my hand, and I heard them say
"no hope." I meditated, I dreamed my life away--it was all I
could do. I don't want to blame anyone--it wouldn't do any
good. But I owe my life to my family. Everyone else gave up.

I studied what happened around me as if it were a tiny
piece of world drama, the bizarre peculiarities of the other
patients in the common room, the entry of the doctors into my
room, the gossip of the nurses who were not embarrassed to
speak about their boyfriends in front of "the extinct one."
That made me an expert on relationships.

Steven Laureys, head of the Coma
Science Group and neurology department at the University of
Liege in Belgium, is the expert who is promoting this hoax as a
medical "mistake." He claims that 25% of people in a coma
are misdiagnosed*
and that 40 percent of the patients diagnosed as being in a
vegetative state are in fact minimally conscious. (Laureys doesn't mention that he's one of the authors of the study.)
(Stephen
Novell has noted that efforts are "underway to develop
better tools for assessing residual conscious function in
patients in a PVS [permanent vegetative state] or MCS [minimally
conscious state] and to correlate these findings with recovery
[for better prediction. For example, functional MRI scanning
has been used to look for conscious processing in those in
an apparent PVS.]")

Laureys says that PET scans were
used to determine that Houben is in a MCS rather than a PVS.
(PET scans measure blood flow.) Houben's mother has taken him to
the U.S. five times over the years, trying to find a doctor who
would give her hope that her son would recover. She finally
found Laureys in Belgium. He is making the most of the situation
and has the mass media beating a path to his clinic's steps. The hoax
has been pounced on by the anti-right-to-die crowd and will
probably reopen the disinformation campaign aimed at destroying health
care reform in the U.S. The god-of-Abraham-is-good crowd will be crowing about this
latest "miracle." I'm sure we'll hear that Obama's "death panels" would have executed this
poor fellow. The
Associated Press reports that Rom is writing a book "about his
experiences."*
I'm sure there will be few movies to follow.

As Randi
says: I'm outraged. This is a sad story that shouldn't end
in exploitainment.

A man presumed to have been in a coma for 23
years has spoken of his “second birth” after
doctors realised that he had been fully
conscious all along but ...

At least
one report (from The New York Post) included a bit of skepticism:

Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, said he is skeptical of Houben’s ability to
communicate after seeing video of his hand being moved along
the keyboard.

“That’s called ’facilitated communication,’” Caplan said.
“That is ouija board stuff. It’s been discredited time and
time again. When people look at it, it’s usually the person
doing the pointing who’s doing the messages, not the person
they claim they are helping.”

Caplan also said the statements Houben allegedly made with
the computer seem unnatural for someone with such a profound
injury and an inability to communicate for decades.

What would Carl
Sagan say? Something similar to what these folks wrote:

Reborn Coma Man’s Words May Be Bogus by Brandon Keim
According to Randi, facilitated communication could
only be considered credible if the facilitator didn’t look at
the keyboard or screen while supporting Houben’s hand, and
helped him type messages in response to questions she had not
heard, thus ensuring that Houben’s responses are entirely his
own.